Sunday, August 06, 2017

Vanderbilt: mathematics is sexist

In the 1990s, left-winger Alan Sokal wrote a bogus paper mocking his fellow leftists who were also postmodernists, feminists, or otherwise mentally crippled beyond the usual standards of the Left. Just because Sokal was licking their rectums and amplifying some of the most stupid propositions by these pompous fools, the reviewers of a "prestigious" journal have accepted the paper despite its complete absurdity.

Related to this topic: at least one engineer wrote at least one 10-page essay titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber arguing that the STEM gender gap is natural. Let's hope that Google won't Bing him. One should be afraid – assorted parasitic neurotic vice-presidential bitches for diversity at Google immediately began to threaten the wise gentleman (and prove his thesis in a clear way). Ranting monkey ran a great story about it.

One of the recurrent themes in his funny paper was the idea that mathematics was sexist and the discipline would look very different if we stopped the discrimination against women etc. Serious papers weren't quite saying these things at that time – yet.

Now, two decades later, papers claiming to be serious are saying the same things as Sokal's hoax from the 1990s. Andrzej pointed out the following Tweet

Genders are social constructs and the "mostly male" independence is a myth, much like the relationship between the independence and mathematical thinking and all such things. The Peabrain University clearly hired this hardcore loon before he deconstructed the social construct in between his legs, with the help of a knife or without it. They don't care about such details – such as the proof that everything that this crackpot has ever said or written may easily be proven wrong by that small thing over there.

Mr Leyva – no, this website doesn't recognize and won't recognize his PhD from "mathematics education", at most his Bc degree from mathematics he got at Rutgers – isn't just quoting some of the most insane feminist claims you have heard of. He doesn't find them radical enough so he's only OK with the "black feminists" and their theory of mathematics and teaching. That paradigm includes the so-called "intersectionality theory" by the black feminist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (check her talk about that "topic"). As you may imagine, this "theory" says that when several dimensions of your identity intersect – e.g. if you are black and female – then you are really oppressed and you have therefore the quintupled right to redefine the value of \(\pi\). And she was so modest that she didn't even mention the intersection of females, blacks, and people with dreads.

He wants all of mathematics to be transformed into the teaching of the oppression of the privileged groups. Who are the evil people who prevent this "progress"? Obviously, it's primarily the white non-Hispanic males. But one group of nasty criminals and oppressors has often been overlooked, Mr Leyva argues:

Even children are complicit in the problem, Leyva argues, citing a 1998 study...

Yes, it's the damn children who seem to be capable of distinguishing boys and girls – and their statistically different thinking, interests, and skills – and these so-called children should be punished for that. All decent people in our society should be black, female, and adult – others should be phased out.

Four weeks ago, he thanked the journal for having published this pile of rubbish:

She has noticed that her fellow deep thinkers have noticed that intersectionality "isn't additive". Additive is "plus". So it must be something else. Maybe it's multiplicative, Ms Missy ingeniously proposes! Well, it makes sense. One meaningful statement of this kind is that probabilities of independent statements are products of probabilities – that's how you may compute the percentage of black females. But aside from probabilities, is the oppression itself multiplicative?

Questions notwithstanding, her theory was immediately supported by Traci – who was probably joking:

Well, in the case of Švejk1983, I feel more confident that he is joking even though his theory makes much more sense – intersectionality actually is divisive, even though not in the sense of fractions. But I am almost certain that Mr Leyva and Ms Missy aren't joking – they write these incredible stupidities seriously, indeed.

We will have to wait for a decade before one of the ingenious scholars also proposes that intersectionality is subtractive, exponential, logarithmic, Bessel's, or described by the Ms Feynman's path integral.

Sorry, lads and girls. Mathematics is mostly a man's game. This fact is indeed caused by men's statistically higher independence and the correlation between the independence and mathematical thinking; by men's higher variance of IQ and most other quantities relatively to women's; and some other things. A woman can obviously become a mathematician and even an excellent one. But if she's rational and competent, she still knows that she is joining a field or an industry that has been predominantly male, that is still predominantly male, and that will almost certainly remain predominantly male for a very long time if not forever.

The inclusion of children among the culprits indicates a new level of aggressiveness as well as the shortage of common sense of their, in this case black feminist, ideology. They really deny things that become rather self-evident to little kids. Most boys are more fascinated by technology than dolls, most girls are more fascinated by dolls than technology, if I formulate the idea in a specific concise way. Kids don't have to be taught that – it's something that emerges even if you try to fight against it.

Lawrence Summers is basically a hardcore feminist as well and he tried to fight against these laws of Nature by buying toy trucks to his twin daughters. "Look, daddy truck is carrying a baby truck," one of them told the other after she arranged them into a socially adhesive configuration. "Maybe I should think what it means," Lawrence Summers finally figured out.

It's symptomatic that the children themselves have joined the growing list of sinners – because it was a truth-telling boy who finally shouted "the emperor has no clothes!" in Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the same name. In that tale, the emperor bought clothes that were said to be invisible to those people who are stupid, unfit, or incompetent – so every adult preferred to stay silent. A boy preserved his honesty, however. Every kid may shout and should shout that the feminists have no clothes – and despite their having no clothes, it's not enough for them to make living because what they expose isn't attractive. So they make their living by writing and saying crap.

And I actually do believe that the subgeneration born around 2010 is more sensible, independent, and truth-telling than the Millennials so these kids are going to scream when they are exposed to feminism and similar garbage.